Nasty little SOB. He allowed an elderly priest to be arrested and let him sit in jail.

"Notre Dame is arresting a priest," the Rev. Norman Weslin, founder of the Lambs of Christ abortion protest group, said as Notre Dame security personnel put plastic restraints on his wrists Friday. "Why are you arresting a priest for trying to stop the killing of a baby? You've got it all backward."

One of Barack Obamas chief accomplishments has been to return the Constitution to a central place in our public discourse.

Unfortunately, the president fomented this upswing in civic interest not by talking up the constitutional aspects of his policy agenda, but by blatantly violating the strictures of our founding document. And hes been most frustrated with the separation of powers, which doesnt allow him to fundamentally transform the country without congressional acquiescence.

But that hasnt stopped him. In its first term, the Administration launched a We Cant Wait initiative, with senior aide Dan Pfeiffer explaining that when Congress wont act, this president will. And earlier this year, President Obama said in announcing his new economic plans that I will not allow gridlock, or inaction, or willful indifference to get in our way.

And so, as we reach the end of another year of political strife thats fundamentally based on clashing views on the role of government in society, I thought Id update a list I made two years ago and hereby present President Obamas top 10 constitutional violations of 2013.

1. Delay of Obamacares out-of-pocket caps. The Labor Department announced in February that it was delaying for a year the part of the healthcare law that limits how much people have to spend on their own insurance. This may have been sensibleinsurers and employers need time to comply with rapidly changing regulationsbut changing the law requires actual legislation.

2. Delay of Obamacares employer mandate. The administration announced via blogpost on the eve of the July 4 holiday that it was delaying the requirement that employers of at least 50 people provide complying insurance or pay a fine. This time it did cite statutory authority, but the cited provisions allow the delay of certain reporting requirements, not of the mandate itself.

3. Delay of Obamacares insurance requirements. The famous pledge that if you like your plan, you can keep it backfired when insurance companies started cancelling millions of plans that didnt comply with Obamacares requirements. President Obama called a press conference last month to proclaim that people could continue buying non-complying plans in 2014despite Obamacares explicit language to the contrary. He then refused to consider a House-passed bill that wouldve made this action legal.

4. Exemption of Congress from Obamacare. A little-known part of Obamacare requires Congressmen and their staff to get insurance through the new healthcare exchanges, rather than a taxpayer-funded program. In the quiet of August, President Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management to interpret the law to maintain the generous congressional benefits.

5. Expansion of the employer mandate penalty through IRS regulation. Obamacare grants tax credits to people whose employers dont provide coverage if they buy a plan through an Exchange established by the Stateand then fines employers for each employee receiving such a subsidy. No tax credits are authorized for residents of states where the exchanges are established by the federal government, as an incentive for states to create exchanges themselves. Because so few (16) states did, however, the IRS issued a rule ignoring that plain text and allowed subsidies (and commensurate fines) for plans coming from a State Exchange, regional Exchange, subsidiary Exchange, and federally-facilitated Exchange.

6. Political profiling by the IRS. After seeing a rise in the number of applications for tax-exempt status, the IRS in 2010 compiled a be on the lookout (BOLO) list to identify organizations engaged in political activities. The list included words such as Tea Party, Patriots, and Israel; subjects such as government spending, debt, or taxes; and activities such as criticizing the government, educating about the Constitution, or challenging Obamacare. The targeting continued through May of this year.

7. Outlandish Supreme Court arguments. Between January 2012 and June 2013, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Justice Departments extreme positions 9 times. The cases ranged from criminal procedure to property rights, religious liberty to immigration, securities regulation to tax law. They had nothing in common other than the governments view that federal power is virtually unlimited. As a comparison, in the entire Bush and Clinton presidencies, the government suffered 15 and 23 unanimous rulings, respectively.

8. Recess appointments. Last year, President Obama appointed three members of the National Labor Relations Board, as well as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, during what he considered to be a Senate recess. But the Senate was still holding pro forma sessions every three daysa technique developed by Sen. Harry Reid to thwart Bush recess appointments. (Meanwhile, the Dodd-Frank Act, which created the CFPB, provides that authority remains with the Treasury Secretary until a director is confirmed by the Senate.) In January, the D.C. Circuit held the NLRB appointments to be unconstitutional, which ruling White House spokesman Jay Carney said only applied to one court, one case, one company.

9. Assault on free speech and due process on college campuses. Responding to complaints about the University of Montanas handling of sexual assault claims, the Department of Educations Office of Civil Rights, in conjunction with the Justice Department, sent the university a letter intended as a national blueprint for tackling sexual harassment. The letter urges a crackdown on unwelcome speech and requires complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere more likely than not standard.

10. Mini-DREAM Act. Congress has shamelessly failed to pass any sort of immigration reform, including for the most sympathetic victims of the current non-system, young people who were brought into the country illegally as children. Nonetheless, President Obama, contradicting his own previous statements claiming to lack authority, directed the Department of Homeland Security to issue work and residence permits to the so-called Dreamers. The executive branch undoubtedly has discretion regarding enforcement priorities, but granting de facto green cards goes beyond a decision to defer deportation in certain cases.

It was hard to limit myself to 10 items, of courseObamacare alone couldve filled many such listsbut these, in my judgment, represent the chief executives biggest dereliction this year of his duty to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and to take care that the law be faithfully executed.

Alas, things may get worse before they get better. New presidential counselor John Podestas belief in governance by fiat is no secret; in a 2010 report, he wrote that focusing on executive power presents a real opportunity for the Obama administration to turn its focus away from a divided Congress and the unappetizing process of making legislative sausage.

Happy New Year!

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review.

I see the reality of the position We the People are in..I'm a realist myself. But remember, George Washington lost many a battle, until he WON the war. I hope for the best in the 2014 elections, but that is but yet another battle we have to win. I'm a Conservative, and I will back a true Conservative candidate. And as Mark Levin has suggested, if you don't see the candidate you can vote for, write in the name of a candidate you can back. But, the bottom line is that the 2014 elections have to be approached with some solid strategy...start praying and working toward a win in 2016 is what I say to everyone I know. The people of America had better come out red hot angry and in large numbers, and show these commie/socialist/marxist infiltrators that we won't allow no stinkin’ leftists to continue to run our country. We have to get off our complaisant arses and stand up and shout out, “we're mad as hell, and we aren't going to take it any more.”

Yes, we will be ready. People are fed up, and must now take the next step...get red hot angry and determined that we Americans aren't going to put up with these leftist infiltrators any longer. We need a couple of slaps in our respective faces to break us out of our stupor, and into fighting mode. There ARE more of us than there are of them. We will NOT be enslaved by communists/socialists/marxists/muslim sympathizers. This is OUR country, and we must burn down that Trojan Horse by the name of oboma, until he and his cronies are nothing more than cinders. Time to get plenty mad, and with courage and resolve, we will win this mission, as our Forefathers and all soldiers of wars past won theirs. We must keep their images in our hearts and minds, and take this country back. This is the message, and we must pass it on.

The truth is out there if people want it... but a seductive serpent promises a life without struggle if we just surrender our liberty on the altar of nanny government. As with all “serpent” promises, ya better damn sure read the “fine print”.

"The unveiling of the dictatorial debacle that is Obamacare absolutely flabbergasts me. It is stunning on so many levels, but the most shocking aspect of it for me is watching millions of free Americans stand idly by while this man, his minions in Congress and his cheerleaders in the press systematically dismantle our Constitution, steal our money, and crush our freedoms."

I have two predictions regarding Professor Hollis's future: 1)tenured or not,she won't have her faculty position much longer...2)she had better make sure her tax returns over the last 15 years don't contain a *single* mistake.

121
posted on 12/27/2013 12:44:17 PM PST
by Gay State Conservative
(Osama Obama Care: A Religion That Will Have You On Your Knees!)

I’m with you on this...Article V it is! And my heartfelt thanks to Mark Levin and his brilliant mind and constitutional knowledge for bringing this to the attention of We the People. Now, let’s put some heft behind this and make it work!

PolitiFact has crowned the promoter in chief’s sound bite for Obamacare the “Lie of the Year” for 2013: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” And let me make a prediction that among his top 10 falsehood contenders for 2014 will be a reversal of what he emphatically stated back on Sept. 9, 2009: “Under our (health care reform) plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.”

Indeed, just a few months later, he reiterated to ABC News: “I laid out a very simple principle, which is this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill. And we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions. And I want to make sure that the provision that emerges meets that test — that we are not in some way sneaking in funding for abortions.”

“Sneaking in funding for abortions,” this administration?

Of course, we didn’t have to wait a year before we discovered that federal funds were in fact being funneled to provide for abortive services in Pennsylvania and New Mexico.

Then the House and Senate, in secret Sunday sessions, passed an omnibus bill and its provision that overturned the 1988 Dornan amendment, which prevented taxpayer dollars from funding abortions in Washington, D.C. (Tragically, that omnibus bill also appropriated $648.5 million for international family planning funding — an increase of $103 million over 2009 funding — and contained funding for Planned Parenthood and for the United Nations Population Fund, both of which have pro-abortion agendas.)

Of course, there have been many other underhanded pro-abortion moves by Barack Obama’s administration since then, right down to the present. In fact, last week, LifeSiteNews.com ran a piece by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., explaining abortion’s rapid growth and funding in and through Obamacare: “Rollout of the Obamacare exchanges reveals that many health insurance plans will subsidize abortion-on-demand. For example, the preliminary data suggests that every insurance plan on the Connecticut health care exchanges will pay for abortion-on-demand. In the most recent example, we learned that 103 of the 112 insurance plans for Members of Congress and congressional staff include elective abortion coverage. Only nine plans offered exclude elective abortion.” (You can go to http://chrissmith.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2013_12-02_floor_flyer_on_member_hc_plans.pdf to view the flier about the nine plans.)

It is clear that there are numerous Obamacare plans that include elective abortion and that billions of taxpayer dollars will be handed out as credits to buy abortion-covering health insurance — a clear violation of the Hyde amendment’s fundamental principle of restricting funds to abortion-subsidizing health insurance plans.

If Obamacare is to encompass the full measure of abortions, Obama knows that he and his cronies must first remove all the stops that prohibit federal funding for the termination of life in the womb. Legislatively, the Dornan amendment was their start. And they will continue to chip away at the Hyde amendment, which prohibits the same through the Labor and Health and Human Services departments — for example, with Medicaid.

Obama knows that if his pro-abortion agenda is to win the war on the womb, his administration must also oppose anti-abortion advocates, and chief among those warriors is the Roman Catholic Church. You know the White House isn’t dumb enough to confront papal power overtly — yet that doesn’t stop it from chipping away at the anti-abortion wall by putting nuns and Catholic contraception views and values in its cross hairs.

On New Year’s Eve, just one day before Obamacare’s mandate forced nonprofit companies and religion-affiliated institutions across the country to provide contraception and drugs that possibly induce abortions in their employee health care plans, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blocked the requirement for a care facility for the elderly, run by Catholic nuns who appealed to the high court for help.

As NPR explained, “churches and other houses of worship are exempt from the birth control requirement, but affiliated institutions that serve the general public are not. That includes charitable organizations, universities and hospitals.”

In response to the nuns’ appeal, the Department of Justice placed the Little Sisters of the Poor in an ethical dilemma in which group members must violate their faith or pay fines. The DOJ argued in legal papers filed last Friday that the nuns don’t have a leg to stand on. The Obama administration tried to explain that they don’t have to offer contraception and abortion-inducing drugs, as long as they sign a government form that delegates the action to a third party. Without signing that “self-certification” form, the nuns would incur steep government fines.

But Mark Rienzi, who is senior counsel for The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, responded on behalf of the nuns to the DOJ’s argument by retorting that government officials “are simply blind to the religious exercise at issue: the Little Sisters and other Applicants cannot execute the form because they cannot deputize a third party to sin on their behalf.”

And where is President Obama — the so-called constitutional lawyer living in our White House — during the whole debate? Coming out to protect the Bill of Rights for the nuns as he has for a number of progressive minorities? No. He’s hiding behind the curtains in the Oval Office, manipulating his minions to follow his pro-abortion biddings.

It is not known when Justice Sotomayor will rule on these ludicrous government actions and violations of the nuns’ personal religious liberty and practice. But one thing we do know is that the Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves right now regarding the government’s obliteration of our First Amendment religious rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

What an utter constitutional and leadership travesty it is that Obamacare’s promoter in chief repeatedly is breaking this promise: “Under our (health care reform) plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.”

Seeing as our president won’t honor life in the womb, please write or call your representatives to let them know where you stand. Read and hand out my friend Randy Alcorn’s book “Why Pro-Life?” (http://www.epm.org). And then ensure your local community of faith is honoring Sanctity of Human Life Sunday on Jan. 20. The day commemorates the Jan. 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision, which legalized abortion in our country. Since then, more than 55 million abortions have taken place in the U.S.

I will follow up next week on Sotomayor’s next action and where this case goes.

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